Studying up after studying down: dilemmas of research on South African conservation professionals

Abstract

‘Studying up’ after one has ‘studied down’ poses a unique set of challenges, heightened by contexts of unequal power relations between different sets of informants. These are illustrated with the author’s experience moving from ethnographic fieldwork in a community adjoining a protected area to preliminary explorations of fieldwork among conservation professionals. Because of the intrinsically personal nature of ethnographic research, aspects of social position, personal history, and reflexive self-monitoring shape these encounters, which – depending upon the situations – result in informal restrictions on access, collaboration and an interest in the ‘expert’ anthropologist, and attempts to shift the loyalties of the anthropologist. While the details of the encounters are specific to the particular cases described, they highlight issues that are endemic to the fraught terrain of conservation in contemporary Africa, and which are likely to confront other researchers who attempt a similar transition from working with a disadvantaged population to working with the officials who would govern and regulate them.

«Étudier vers le haut» après qu’on ait «étudié vers le bas» présente un ensemble unique de défis, exacerbés par des relations de pouvoir inégales entre les différents ensembles d’informateurs. Ceux-ci sont illustrés par l’expérience de l’auteur acquise en quittant un terrain ethnographique avec une communauté attenante à une zone protégée pour une exploration préliminaire de terrain avec des professionnels de la conservation. En raison de la nature intrinsèquement personnelle de la recherche ethnographique, les aspects de la position sociale, de l’histoire personnelle et de l’auto-surveillance réflexive façonnent ces rencontres qui, selon la situation, donnent lieu à des restrictions informelles sur l’accès, la collaboration et un intérêt pour l’ «expert» anthropologue, ainsi que des tentatives pour basculer les loyautés de l’anthropologue. Bien que les détails des rencontres soient spécifiques aux cas particuliers décrits, ils mettent en évidence des questions qui sont endémiques au terrain épineux de la conservation en Afrique contemporaine, et qui sont susceptibles de confronter d’autres chercheurs qui tentent une transition similaire entre travailler avec des populations défavorisées et travailler avec les fonctionnaires qui les régissent et les réglementent.

Keywords:

• conservation
• reflexivity
• positionality
• studying up
• South Africa

Mots-clefs:

• La conservation
• la réflexivité
• la positionnalité
• étudier vers le haut
• l’Afrique du Sud

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Derick Fay http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1396-2842

Notes

1. A pseudonym.

2. The Parks Board had taken over from Eastern Cape Nature Conservation, the earlier conservation authority, in 2005–2006, with a substantial senior staff turnover.

3. Notably Herman Timmermans, with whom I had collaborated at length.

4. As Maguranyanga notes, ‘de-racialization’ or ‘Africanization’ of park management does not necessarily ensure the ‘transformation’ of park management practices (2009, 183).

5. Pseudonyms are used for this individual and his job title.

6. Bourdieu, of course, develops this distinction with respect to ‘commerce vs. art’ among cultural producers, but one could highlight a similar distinction along the lines of ‘exclusionary conservation vs. people and parks’ approaches in the conservation industry, where the former remains more prestigious, tied to historical practices and popular understandings of conservation.

7. I do not use pseudonyms here given that the material is on the public record.

8. The history of the Dwesa-Cwebe MPA is overlapping but separate from that of the terrestrial Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve. The MPA was established in 1998, outside of the negotiations over co-management that were going on as part of the land claim, and in 2005, conservation authorities began enforcement of no-take policy in earnest.

9. The Magistrate indicated in his written opinion that the MPA declaration might not withstand constitutional scrutiny, but it was outside of his authority to rule on the constitutionality of legislation and administrative actions.

10. Legal language, and cross-examination in particular, has been one of the classic sites of ‘studying up’ in the USA (Conley and O’Barr 2005; cf. Donovan 2008, 146–149).

11. I say ‘apparently’ here because in the course of the cross-examination the prosecutor effectively conceded the existence of a system of customary regulation of natural resources, one of the points the LRC aimed to establish.

12. I am particularly grateful to the editors for helping to clarify my thinking around these points.

13. The ‘boundary object’ concept developed in a context in actor-network theory in order to facilitate the analysis of heterogeneous situations involving diverse networks of actors; it allows for an account that may decentre any particular actor in favour of attention to the ways that networks of diverse actors and claims articulate, enable and foreclose certain courses of action, and allow certain accounts and versions of reality to become more or less factual and true.